About a week ago one of my favorite bread bloggers, Maurizio Leo, put up a new post on how to make naturally leavened (so sourdough, but they’re not sour at all) Bomboloni, or Italian donuts. I practically started drooling when I saw the post and the included pictures, but I looked through the recipe and immediately decided it was beyond what I was capable of. They take about 3 days total time to make, require very delicate handling, and involved frying them. In thinking through the process, and therein lie the problem, it felt overwhelming,

A few years ago I wrote an article about how to get started with biofeedback training and I specifically called out to people who were trying to “think” their way through it. I was responding to countless people who tell me they’re interested in trying biofeedback but they couldn’t wrap their heads around exactly how it would work.

The problem with this way of thinking is that by its very nature the less experience you have with something the less able you are to map out the reality of executing all of it in your head. A very experienced baker could have looked at that recipe and truly understood, at a functional level, how it would all come together and then would be able make an accurate assessment of how hard it actually was. But if you have literally​ no experience with something, as most people with biofeedback, you can’t make a good assessment of how complicated, effective, easy, or anything it might be.

Humans are remarkably well suited to actually doing things. Interacting with their environments. We have unbelievable dexterity in our hands and incredible eyesight at both extremely close and relatively pretty far ranges. We’re ideally suited for touching, feeling, changing, and physically engaging with our environment.

Thinking on the other hand. Well let’s just say, based on what I know of philosophy, I’m not entirely convinced of humans’ faculties for thinking our way through anything.

Which is to say, it’s almost always harder to think your way through something, exponentially more so the less experience you have with it, than it is to actually engage and start doing it.

As you start moving through the process you’re sure to encounter pitfalls and difficulties but you learn from them and move through them.

You won’t learn anything from thinking your way through something you’ve never done.

Your imagination isn’t that good. You can’t see the steps of a process you haven’t done, likely even if you think laterally from something similar you’ve done.

The Japanese have embraced this reality in how they approach erosion control. They don’t make massive pre-planned changes to the environment that have been carefully “thought-out.” Instead, they make very small incremental changes and then wait to see what happens, what effects occur that perhaps weren’t expected or considered. Despite their vast experience, they are aware they can’t predict how the next project will go.

One of my favorite things my good friend, and the GM of Movement Minneapolis, Mark Schneider said years ago comes back to me often. In response to people who say they’re afraid of skydiving Mark said: “You’re not afraid of skydiving, you don’t even know enough about the experience of skydiving to be afraid of it.”

I’ve always loved this. Your experience of jumping off a swing set or being on a tall building has virtually no application to the reality of skydiving. You don’t even know enough about it to be able to think your way through it in an accurate sense.

And so it was with the bomboloni recipe. I made them, I made mistakes, I learned from the experience and I made some of the most delicious treats I’ve ever had in my life with my own two hands from nothing much more than flour, water, eggs, and sugar.

 

This is not a rah rah pep talk to convince you that you can do anything you set your mind to. I’ll be the wet blanket to tell you that it’s entirely possible that if you set out to take action on something that seems too hard you will make a bunch of mistakes or even totally screw it up.

But at least you’ll be playing the game.

At the very worst you’ll be guaranteed to learn and grow from it, which is more than you’ll ever get from thinking your way through it.

This past weekend I went to a sourdough bread baking class. As you know, since the beginning of the year I’ve been making bread pretty regularly, at least once a week. But bread making is a complex art and science, heavy on the practical insight and skill you develop by actually doing it over a long period of time. As a result there were specific pieces of my bread-making game that I felt could be improved by asking a couple questions of a master.

So I found this class taught by the head baker of La Colombe in Philly, John McGrath.

The 2-hour class was great, but I’ll be frank with you, I could have taught it. In the three months I’ve been baking I’ve done a deep dive, as I always do with new interests. I’ve hoovered up just about all the basics you need to know to get started making sourdough. In fact, there were probably some tips for the home baker that I’ve picked up or discovered that he has long since forgotten as a professional.

And yet, I got exactly what I wanted out of the class and I know it’s going to have an enormous impact on my baking. Here’s why:

Baking sourdough bread is about a 24-hour process, maybe 12 if you really push everything. How can you accomplish this in 2 hours then? John had smartly broken up the process into the distinct steps, and then taken some of the steps ahead of time so that we could do all the steps, albeit in a shorter amount of time and out of order. So we had dough that the bakery had prepared all the way up to the point of pre-shaping and shaping it into a loaf, which we did and we also made dough from scratch using the exact same ingredients as the former.

The net effect of this was that I was able to bring home two loaves of bread to bake, that were *almost* identical but with a couple steps in the process happening differently.

If you’re following me here, this ends up being a pretty great way to isolate which steps of the process are contributing certain effects.

I took both loaves home and baked them. The one John’s team made ahead of time and I pre-shaped and shaped was the best, almost a carbon copy of the one we baked in class that they did 100% of. So I know my pre-shaping and shaping is good.

The one that I made from scratch was way better than my usual, but not as good as the other one.

From this I can deduce that the differences are either the ingredients, the mixing, or the folding during the bulk fermentation. As it happens my ingredients are already almost identical to theirs, so I’ve reasoned that my hand mixing isn’t contributing to as much gluten development.

I could have spent another year trying to figure this all out, and in a two hour class I was able to isolate exactly what I need to work on. Plus, I was able to ask a few targeted, specific questions about the things I knew were the weakest links right now.

You, dear reader, may not care about bread baking, but I would bet you do care about improving a skill, your health, your fitness, or anything for that matter.

The hands-on practical experience and isolation of actual application is something you simply can’t get as a “transfer of knowledge” from reading a book or an article. It has to be lived and experienced.

And I think most people undervalue that kind of information living in a time when knowledge is not only no longer at a premium, there’s actually entirely too much of it.

It’s why the programs I create focus heavily on self-experimentation and gathering your own data, and it’s why my articles aren’t long “fact”-laden treatises on what the empirically best way to shear a sheep is.

I’m much more interested in impressing upon you the need to do your own practical experimentation, and giving you the tools and mental models for doing so.

Biofeedback, in your training for example, is the best such way I’ve found for doing so with strength and fitness. It does no good to know that “this” is the best way to do a pull-up, if “that” is the best (or only) way that works for you.

So my question is, how can you crack open the practice of the skill you’re trying to improve? Take a class? Hire a coach? Find a mentor?

I hardly ever look at Facebook anymore. I know that is especially trendy and topical this week, but it’s true. And I don’t say that to brag or lord some sort of perceived superiority over others who do use it. It’s just that a couple years ago I realized I was habitually clicking that link and mindlessly scrolling through the feed. I installed a news feed blocker, and ever since then even when I open the site, I’m met with a mostly blank page, so I go on to do something else. It lost its allure.

Anyway, I preface with that because I was killing time waiting for a flight and I was scrolling through my Facebook feed on my phone when I came across this post & thread.

In the, an extremely popular and well respected nutrition expert lays out his case for why he believes, based on the “weight of evidence”, that BCAA’s are totally useless and a waste of money. He’s certainly one of the flag bearers of the “evidence-based” nutrition team, and has contributed a tremendous amount to separating the wheat from the chaff in the fitness world. There’s real value in using the best method we know how to understand the world, the scientific method, to figure out how things work. But, the problem comes when you treat science like a religion.

Here’s the relevant part of the thread (I’ve obscured the names because the point here is not a call-out, but rather to point out the fallacy that occurs over and over again):

You have someone, two people actually, who have by all accounts done the ultimate scientific experiment. They have, over a long timeline and under multiple conditions, experimented with the experimental variable and found that for them there are specific benefits available only under that experimental condition.

And the response by the High Priest is to tell them to buy a magic crystal pendant instead?

This is shameful.

It’s not science. And it certainly isn’t being evidence based. This person is telling you that the most relevant evidence for them, their own data that they’ve gathered under the conditions most relevant to them have led them to a certain conclusion, and the response is to tell them a magic crystal would work better?

This is how the High Priests of Gurudom maintain their power and status as the arbiters of what is right and true, cloaked under a thin veil of scientism.

The reason I’m highlighting all of this for you, dear reader, is because I already know you’re smarter than this and I want you to have the confidence and surety to run your own experiments and to make your own discoveries.

I feel like I’ve written about this ad nauseam​ but I’m going to have to keep writing about it because everywhere I look there is more and more trust placed in the myopic uber-rationalism of science.

Science is, in a sort of iconically metaphorical way, a microscope. It’s absolutely wonderful for looking very, very closely at something and seeing how the individual parts work and move. A scientist takes the microscope of science and looks closely and carefully and sees gears turning and levers moving, there’s even a tiny pendulum swinging! They conclude they’re looking at a mechanical watch. But then they take the microscope away, look at the entire system, and realize they’ve been studying a Rube Goldberg machine that powers a drinking bird.

On the other hand, you there, standing on the outside simply using all of your available powers of observation, deduction, and reasoning already knew it was a drinking bird.